Apple to the rescue

This may be a far-fetched sentence, but Apple may be –as a side effect of selling gazillions of their devices- saving the printed media industry, and with it, offering photographers a lifeline.

There is no doubt that the productized innovations Apple brings to life are of extreme quality. Most of them are sexy just by themselves however, the more lasting effects are the behavioral patterns that change in us and stay with us longer than the products themselves. The personal computer, the iPod, revolutionizing our music library, and have us rediscover portable music, iTunes and the App Store, making us think we can buy everything “by the song” and on-demand, and the time-bending Podcast anybody-can-broadcast radio shows. More recently, the swipe and pinch gestures present on the iPhone and then on tablets. I find it really amuzing when kids try these out at deceptively not touch-enabled big-screen TVs.

But the latest lasting contribution by Apple may come attached with the new iPad.

I am not an iPad user myself, mainly because I usually carry my laptop around and I have not found an excuse yet to get one of these, but I have started to see a trend in many iPad users to have paid subscriptions to magazines. The quality of the media is just amazing and the experience resembles more closely –and sometimes improves- that of a traditional magazine. Content is “curated”, carefully diagrammed and the quality of the photography is great.

The latest addition to the iPad family, the iPad III, has a Retina display.

More resolution, fine, everybody gets it. But here is the biggest impact of it: at 264 dots per inch, it is coming really, really close to the standard 300dpi resolution for most printed output!

The Retina display is not just a higher resolution screen, it is effectively replacing paper! Granted, the experience is that of a “backlit paper” and it does not have exactly the same quality of our traditional dead tree material, but in terms of resolution, it is very close.

So these three elements: the availability of quality content, the improvement of the reading experience, and a suitable physical media that effectively replaces paper, plus “always on” connectivity. This may be what a 2012 Guttenberg would have in mind!

I am a relentless optimist, and I think that this will manifest itself in the next couple of years as a renaissane of the printed media industry –or should I say “pay to read” industry?- and with it, more work for photographers for other three reasons: first, better content expectations can only be fulfilled RELIABLY by dedicated, proficient professional photographers; second, the revenue stream from paid subscriptions offers a sustainable model to pay for such talent; and, maybe not as important but still a factor, the higher resolution screens require better photo quality production from end-to-end, from capture to manipulation.

Huba Rostonics is a Weston, FL-based Photographer, Blogger and Photography instructor. He is constantly looking for new things to put a frame around. You can check his work at http://www.rostonics.com. He also publishes a free weekly photography podcast in Spanish on http://www.Phocaccia.com/podcasts.